The availability of various computer-based devices and computer networks, and the growing amount of images and video contents being generated by computer applications in different fields, lead to a demand for efficient methods for archiving such data at remote data storage libraries.
As an example, in the medical field, a large amount of patient imaging data including X-rays, computed tomography images (CTI), magnetic resonance images (MRI), ultra-sound video recordings, etc. are generated everyday at hospitals and medical clinics. The image and video data is often stored in a digital format to facilitate its handling, transmission, storing and retrieving. At the present, the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) format is a commonly used standard for handling medical images and video data.
Typically, images and video data come from decentralized workstations and client devices such as laptop computers, PDAs, workstations, as well as computers that are connected to an image-producing equipment like a MRI system at a hospital. These decentralized client computers often need to retrieve previously stored images and video data from a server and data archive library systems that are connected to the server for data archiving.
Current data archiving solutions typically use tape library systems where workstations and client devices are connected to one or more servers, and the servers are connected to one or more libraries. In large data centers, such as those providing imaging for health care, entertainment, weather, military, and space exploration applications, these servers and libraries are often interconnected in a grid computing environment. The computing grid allows much flexibility in the sharing of image and video data. However, the amount of data for archive and retrieval is staggering and in the Exabyte (1000 Petabyte) scale. To mitigate the unnecessary transfer of unwanted data during the search for specific data, the desired data must be identified based on information other than the data itself, before the entire set of images or video streams are retrieved from the tape library to the user. Such a technique for screening of data improves the overall performance and usability of the archive system.
From the foregoing, there still exists a need for an efficient system, method and computer program product for storing and retrieving image, video, and other multimedia data in a client-server archive library.